Drew Barrymore has shared an urgent warning to other parents after making an unsettling discovery on her young daughter's phone.
The actress-turned-talk-show host seemingly had a few reservations when it came to giving her child a phone, but after she gave in to the pressure, she soon realized that she had made a grave mistake.
Speaking about the incident in a recent post published to her Instagram page, she opened up about why she regretted giving her now 12-year-old daughter Olive a cell phone.
"I am writing (in a very vulnerable way) to put myself out there as a parent," her post started. "It's personal for me. I wished many times when I was a kid that someone would tell me no. I wanted so badly to rebel all the time, and it was because I had no guardrails. I had too much access to excess, and eventually 'no' actually became a challenge."
She went on to state that she made sure that as a parent, she gave all her children - Barrymore is also mom to daughter Frankie whom she shares alongside Olive with her ex-husband Will Kopelman - a more structured upbringing compared to the one she had when she was a child.
"Now that I am a mother, I cannot believe I am in a world that I know correlates to my own personal pitfalls and many of my peers who got into too much, too soon," she continued.
"Kids are not supposed to be exposed to this much. Kids are supposed to be protected. Kids are supposed to hear NO. But we are living in an a la carte system as caretakers, in a modern, fast-moving world where tiny little computers are in every adult's hands, modeling that it is OK to be attached to a device that is portal to literally everything," she stated.
The dangers of this became evident when the 49-year-old didn't say "no" and handed her daughter her very first cell phone - with some restrictions though.
"All her friends had one, the age-old phenomenon all parents face: the comparison argument," she explained. "And so, on her 11th birthday, she got a phone, only to be used on the weekends and for a limited time with no social media."
However, just three months after giving her the gift, she decided to take it away after making a horrifying discovery.
"Within three months, I gathered the data of the texts and the behavior. I was shocked by the results," she confessed. "Life depended on the phone. Happiness was embedded in it. Life source came from this mini digital box. Moods were dependent on the device."
So she decided that this wasn't going to continue so she printed out some of the texts that her daughter had been sending as well as other conversations she was engaged in.
"I handed her a stack of pages and said this is not a black void that these travel to. They're permanent somewhere where we don't see it, so we don't believe in its retractable and damning nature if we fail digitally to act with decency," she stated in the lengthy post.
"I made sure she knew she was a good person and that this was not punishment on her character. She is so awesome, and I so understood her desires to be part of it all. Even though she didn't have any social media on her phone, let's face it... it can seem like the ultimate party, and I was taking her away from that - not because she did anything wrong, but because it was not time yet," she added before coming to the conclusion: "...I am not ready either to allow my kids to have a phone."
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The raw and honest post received over 118,000 likes in a matter of days with hundreds taking to the comments to discuss the topic further.
"I, and parents everywhere, appreciate you verbalizing our concerns and working on solutions. We can solve this if we act together," wrote one user, while another added: "Yes to all of it. Thank you for your reflection and the research. Was hoping at the end you were going to reveal a new kind of dumb phone. Hoping this all comes to something like that before my kids teenage years."
A third also offered some advice: "If you are taking your kids phones away please also address your own relationship with your phone. I see so many parents GLUED to their phones at all times. Literally missing their kids lives. It's sad."
Do you think Barrymore did the right thing?
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